A psychological interpretation of science begins with the acute realization that science is a human creation, rather than an autonomous, non-human, or per se "thing" with intrinsic rules of its own. Its origins are in human motives, its goals are human goals, and it is created, renewed, and maintained by human beings. Its laws, organization, and articulations rest not only on the nature of the reality that it discovers, but also on the nature of the human nature that does the discovering. The psychologist, especially if he has had any clinical experience, will quite naturally and spontaneously approach any subject matter in a personal way by studying people, rather than the abstractions they produce, scientists as well as science.
The misguided effort to make believe that this is not so, the persistent attempt to make science completely autonomous and self-regulating and to regard it as a disinterested game, having intrinsic, arbitrary chesslike rules, the psychologist must consider unrealistic, false, and even anti-empirical.
... Scientists are motivated, like all other members of the human species, by species-wide needs for food, etc.; by needs for safety, protection, and care; by needs for gregariousness and for affection-and-love relations; by needs for respect, standing, and status, with consequent self-respect; and by a need for self-actualization or self-fulfillment of the idiosyncratic and species-wide potentialities of the individual person. These are the needs that are best known to psychologists for the simple reason that their frustration produces psychopathology.
Less studied but knowable through common observation are the cognitive needs for sheer knowledge (curiosity) and for understanding (the philosophical, theological, value-system-building explanation needed).
Finally, least well known are the impulses to beauty, symmetry, and possibly to simplicity, completion, and order, which we may call aesthetic needs, and the needs to express, to act out, and to motor completion that may be related to these aesthetic needs.
To date it seems as if all other needs or desires or drives are either means to the basic ends listed above, or are neurotic, or else are products of certain kinds of learning processes.
Obviously the cognitive needs are of most concern to the philosopher of science. It is man's persistent curiosity that is most responsible for science in its natural-history stage, and it is his equally persistent desire to understand, explain, and systematize that generates science in its more theoretical and abstract levels. However, it is this latter theoretical urge that is more specifically a sine qua non for science, for sheer curiosity is seen often enough in animals.
But the other motives are certainly also involved in science at all its stages. It is too often overlooked that the original theorizers of science often thought of science primarily as a means to help the human race. Bacon, for instance, expected much amelioration of disease and poverty from science. It has been shown that even for Greek science where pure unmanual contemplation of the Platonic sort was a strong tradition, the practical and humanistic trend was also fairly strong. The feeling of identification and belongingness with people in general, and even more strongly the feeling of love for human beings may often be the primary motivation in many men of science. Some people go into science, as they might into social work or medicine, in order to help people.
And then finally we must recognize that any other human need may serve as a primary motivation for going into science, for working at it, or for staying in it. It may serve as a living, a source of prestige, a means of self-expression, or as a satisfaction for any one of many neurotic needs.
In most persons, a single primary all-important motive is less often found than a combination in varying amounts of all motivations working simultaneously. It is safest to assume that in any single scientist his work is motivated not only by love, but also by simple curiosity, not only by prestige, but also by the need to earn money, etc.
Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (2nd ed., 1970: 1-3)
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
08 November 2010
13 February 2010
the morality of children's books
Broadly speaking, we can say that modern expert opinion has replaced the mutual exclusion of medical and judicial discourses by a game that could be called the game of dual, medical and judicial, qualification. This practice, this technique of dual qualification, organizes the realm of that very strange notion, "perversity," that begins to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century and that will dominate the entire field of this double determination and authorize the appearance of a range of manifestly obsolete, laughable, and puerile terms or elements in the discourse of experts who are justified as scientists. When you go through these expert medico-legal opinions ... you are struck by terms like laziness, pride, stubbornness, and nastiness. You are given biographical elements that do not in any way explain the action in question but are kinds of miniature warning signs, little scenes of childhood, little childish scenes that are presented as already analogous to the crime. It is a kind of scaled-down criminality for children characterized by the language used by parents or by the morality of children's books. In fact, the puerility of the terms, notions, and analysis at the heart of modern expert medico-legal opinion has a very precise function: it makes possible an exchange between juridical categories defined by the penal code, which stipulates that one can only punish when there is malice or a real intention to harm, and medical notions like "immaturity," "weak ego," "undeveloped superego," "character structure," and so on. You can see how notions like those of perversity make it possible to stitch together the series of categories defining malice and intentional harm and categories constituted within a more or less medical, or at any rate, psychiatric, psychopathological, or psychological discourse. The whole field of notions of perversity, converted into their puerile vocabulary, enables medical notions to function in the field of judicial power and, conversely, juridical notions to function in medicine's sphere of competence. This set of notions functions, then, as a switch point, and the weaker it is epistemologically, the better in functions.
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 32-33)
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 32-33)
14 January 2010
fallen desperately in love with an inch
It is no wonder that names have been considered uncanny manifestations of supernatural power, and that men have identified their names with their souls or used them to invoke spiritual forces. Indeed, the power of words has gone to man's head in more than one way. To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself—to label a certain part of his experience "I."
This is, perhaps, the meaning of the ancient belief that the name is the soul. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
Feeling separate, the sense of conflict between man, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, begins. Language and thought grapple with the conflict, and the magic which can summon a man by naming him is applied to the universe. Its powers are named, personalized, and invoked in mythology and religion. Natural processes are made intelligible, because all regular processes—such as the rotation of the stars and seasons—can be fitted to words and ascribed to the activity of the gods or God, the eternal Word. At a later time science employs the same process, studying every kind of regularity in the universe, naming, classifying, and making use of them in ways still more miraculous.
But because it is the use and nature of words and thoughts to be fixed, definite, isolated, it is extremely hard to describe the most important characteristic of life—its movement and fluidity. Just as money does not represent the perishability and edibility of food, so words and thoughts do no represent the vitality of life. The relation between thought and movement is something like the difference between a real man running and a motion-picture film which shows the running as a series of "stills."
... It is most convenient for scientific calculation to think of a movement as a series of very small jerks or stills. But confusion arises when the world described and measured by such conventions is identified with the world of experience. A series of stills does not, unless rapidly moved before our eyes, convey the essential vitality and beauty of movement. The definition, the description, leaves out the most important thing.
Useful as these conventions are for purposes of calculation, language, and logic, absurdities arise when we think that the kind of language we can use or the kind of logic with which we reason can really define or explain the "physical" world. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be "intelligible" in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. It is to prefer a motion-picture film to a real, running man. To feel that life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951: 46-48)
This is, perhaps, the meaning of the ancient belief that the name is the soul. For to define is to isolate, to separate some complex of forms from the stream of life and say, "This is I." When man can name and define himself, he feels that he has an identity. Thus he begins to feel, like the word, separate and static, as over against the real, fluid world of nature.
Feeling separate, the sense of conflict between man, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, begins. Language and thought grapple with the conflict, and the magic which can summon a man by naming him is applied to the universe. Its powers are named, personalized, and invoked in mythology and religion. Natural processes are made intelligible, because all regular processes—such as the rotation of the stars and seasons—can be fitted to words and ascribed to the activity of the gods or God, the eternal Word. At a later time science employs the same process, studying every kind of regularity in the universe, naming, classifying, and making use of them in ways still more miraculous.
But because it is the use and nature of words and thoughts to be fixed, definite, isolated, it is extremely hard to describe the most important characteristic of life—its movement and fluidity. Just as money does not represent the perishability and edibility of food, so words and thoughts do no represent the vitality of life. The relation between thought and movement is something like the difference between a real man running and a motion-picture film which shows the running as a series of "stills."
... It is most convenient for scientific calculation to think of a movement as a series of very small jerks or stills. But confusion arises when the world described and measured by such conventions is identified with the world of experience. A series of stills does not, unless rapidly moved before our eyes, convey the essential vitality and beauty of movement. The definition, the description, leaves out the most important thing.
Useful as these conventions are for purposes of calculation, language, and logic, absurdities arise when we think that the kind of language we can use or the kind of logic with which we reason can really define or explain the "physical" world. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be "intelligible" in this sense is to want it to be something other than life. It is to prefer a motion-picture film to a real, running man. To feel that life is meaningless unless "I" can be permanent is like having fallen desperately in love with an inch.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951: 46-48)
25 July 2009
plague throughout
As a science, medicine rests on and makes use of the same methods and principles as the physical sciences. One of these principles is that the observer is a person, and the object he observes is not. Chemists and physicists observe, for example, the characteristics of various elements and classify them as helium, lithium, uranium, and so forth. The classification serves the interests of the classifiers. The objects classified have no interests.
To understand the many conceptual, economic, and political problems that beset contemporary medical practice, that is, medicine as health care, we must distinguish between scientific medicine, whose objects of study are diseases that affect human beings, and clinical medicine, whose objects of study are persons, usually called "patients." Making this distinction does not imply that one is intellectually, morally, or practically better or more important than the other. Each enterprise has its own agenda and vocabulary.
· The aim of scientific medicine, an enterprise barely 150 years old, is to increase our understanding of the causes and cures of conditions scientifically defined as diseases. The aim of clinical medicine, which may be said to be as old as civilization, is to help persons regarded as sick recover their health.
· The practitioner of medical science seeks to understand disease. The practitioner of clinical medicine seeks to relieve dis-ease.
· Scientific medical knowledge is indifferent to individual or collective human well-being; it may be equally useful for biological warfare and the relief of human suffering. In contrast, the raison d'être of clinical medicine is the welfare of the patient.
... In the ancient world, disease was a gnostic concept, concerned with "spiritual truth," not with empirical evidence. In Biblical, Greek, and Roman accounts, disease is a holistic-theistic concept that precludes distinguishing between literal and metaphorical illnesses, between diseases of the body and diseases of the mind. There is no Latin word for our scientific concept of disease. When the Romans spoke of disease, they used the word "morbus"—the root of the English words "morbid" and "morbidity"—which also means disaster, fault, and vice; or the word "malum"—the root of such English words as "malefactor" and "malevolent"—which also means evil, harm, hardship, and punishment. The King James Version of the Scriptures uses the terms "murrain," "plague," and "pestilence," instead of the term "disease." The Revised Standard Version uses "plague" throughout. Accordingly, the act of healing entailed intermingling natural and supernatural means of influence, medical and religious methods of treating the body and the mind.
... Deluged by incessant advertising and propaganda about medical treatments, people forget that Christianity is not only a faith of redemption but also a faith of healing, of both body and soul. Unlike Abraham, Jesus is not only a prophet, he is also a healer, the Divine Physician, the Savior (der Heiland in German). For centuries, Christians regarded sickness as punishment for sin, curable by means of prayer, repentance, sacrifice, and the aspersion of holy water by a priest, the representative of an all-forgiving deity.
To be plague-stricken was to be smitten by God. This put people in a bind: They believed in the theological explanation of the "plague," at least in part, because they could not get at the natural, physical cause of it, and then they refrained from trying to get at the root of the evil because they thought the evil was brought on by the hand of God. Furthermore, everyday life was replete with proof of the efficacy of miraculous cures for illnesses of all kinds. Shrines with powers of healing dotted the Christian landscape. More than 5 million pilgrims a year still visit Lourdes, and, to this day, the Vatican's official procedure for sanctification depends on medical proof of the would-be saint's having performed at least two miraculous cures.
... In short, prior to the nineteenth century, neither physicians nor patients had a precise idea about what was and what was not a disease. Disease was simply a discomfort and a danger, often leading to death, to be avoided and relieved as best one could. ... As the taboo against treating the body slowly lifted, there arose a diverse corps of professional healers: barber surgeons performing operations; herbalists prescribing medicines derived from plants; and doctors of medicine relying mainly on purging the body of presumed toxic substances believed to be the causes of disease.
... The waning influence of religion and the waxing prestige of science were slow and gradual processes. In the sixteenth century, the Church began to authorize the dissection of executed felons. Although physicians participated in this enterprise, the true fathers of anatomy were the great Renaissance artists, especially Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
... Once the secrets of nature are revealed, they cannot be ignored. Physicians and lay persons alike began to view the body as a machine whose workings must be understood, rather than merely manipulated in the tradition of herbal empiricists. The stage was now set for the development of the scientific diagnosis of patients, both dead and alive. The diagnosis of live patients is a surprisingly recent development. The first diagnostic method, thoracic percussion, was discovered in 1756 by Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the son of an innkeeper in Graz, Austria. As a youngster, Auenbrugger learned to tap caskets of wine to determine the quantity of liquid in the container and applied the technique to the human chest. This simple but ingenious method led the famed French physician, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) to hit on the idea of thoracic auscultation and, in 1816, to the invention of the stethoscope. Although standard thermometric values were developed in the seventeenth century, the systematic measurement of body temperature was introduced into medicine only in 1851. The development of an ever-growing array of diagnostic instruments and techniques followed quickly. Today, the practicing physician can diagnose many diseases in the living patient as objectively and almost as effectively as the pathologist can diagnose them at autopsy. The long-standing gap between antemortem (clinical) diagnosis and postmortem (autopsy) diagnosis has narrowed but has not disappeared. Despite modern diagnostic techniques, the postmortem examination of the cadaver remains an indispensable tool for scientific medicine and forensic pathology.
... Although the development of the modern, scientific concept of disease was a gradual process, the publication, in 1858, of Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological History, by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), is generally accepted as signaling the birth of modern medicine as a profession based on empirical science. The study of pathology as the phenomenology of disease, combined with the study of bacteriology as the etiology of infectious disease, placed medicine as the study of bodily disease on the rock-solid foundation of modern science.
Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001: xxiii-6)
To understand the many conceptual, economic, and political problems that beset contemporary medical practice, that is, medicine as health care, we must distinguish between scientific medicine, whose objects of study are diseases that affect human beings, and clinical medicine, whose objects of study are persons, usually called "patients." Making this distinction does not imply that one is intellectually, morally, or practically better or more important than the other. Each enterprise has its own agenda and vocabulary.
· The aim of scientific medicine, an enterprise barely 150 years old, is to increase our understanding of the causes and cures of conditions scientifically defined as diseases. The aim of clinical medicine, which may be said to be as old as civilization, is to help persons regarded as sick recover their health.
· The practitioner of medical science seeks to understand disease. The practitioner of clinical medicine seeks to relieve dis-ease.
· Scientific medical knowledge is indifferent to individual or collective human well-being; it may be equally useful for biological warfare and the relief of human suffering. In contrast, the raison d'être of clinical medicine is the welfare of the patient.
... In the ancient world, disease was a gnostic concept, concerned with "spiritual truth," not with empirical evidence. In Biblical, Greek, and Roman accounts, disease is a holistic-theistic concept that precludes distinguishing between literal and metaphorical illnesses, between diseases of the body and diseases of the mind. There is no Latin word for our scientific concept of disease. When the Romans spoke of disease, they used the word "morbus"—the root of the English words "morbid" and "morbidity"—which also means disaster, fault, and vice; or the word "malum"—the root of such English words as "malefactor" and "malevolent"—which also means evil, harm, hardship, and punishment. The King James Version of the Scriptures uses the terms "murrain," "plague," and "pestilence," instead of the term "disease." The Revised Standard Version uses "plague" throughout. Accordingly, the act of healing entailed intermingling natural and supernatural means of influence, medical and religious methods of treating the body and the mind.
... Deluged by incessant advertising and propaganda about medical treatments, people forget that Christianity is not only a faith of redemption but also a faith of healing, of both body and soul. Unlike Abraham, Jesus is not only a prophet, he is also a healer, the Divine Physician, the Savior (der Heiland in German). For centuries, Christians regarded sickness as punishment for sin, curable by means of prayer, repentance, sacrifice, and the aspersion of holy water by a priest, the representative of an all-forgiving deity.
To be plague-stricken was to be smitten by God. This put people in a bind: They believed in the theological explanation of the "plague," at least in part, because they could not get at the natural, physical cause of it, and then they refrained from trying to get at the root of the evil because they thought the evil was brought on by the hand of God. Furthermore, everyday life was replete with proof of the efficacy of miraculous cures for illnesses of all kinds. Shrines with powers of healing dotted the Christian landscape. More than 5 million pilgrims a year still visit Lourdes, and, to this day, the Vatican's official procedure for sanctification depends on medical proof of the would-be saint's having performed at least two miraculous cures.
... In short, prior to the nineteenth century, neither physicians nor patients had a precise idea about what was and what was not a disease. Disease was simply a discomfort and a danger, often leading to death, to be avoided and relieved as best one could. ... As the taboo against treating the body slowly lifted, there arose a diverse corps of professional healers: barber surgeons performing operations; herbalists prescribing medicines derived from plants; and doctors of medicine relying mainly on purging the body of presumed toxic substances believed to be the causes of disease.
... The waning influence of religion and the waxing prestige of science were slow and gradual processes. In the sixteenth century, the Church began to authorize the dissection of executed felons. Although physicians participated in this enterprise, the true fathers of anatomy were the great Renaissance artists, especially Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
... Once the secrets of nature are revealed, they cannot be ignored. Physicians and lay persons alike began to view the body as a machine whose workings must be understood, rather than merely manipulated in the tradition of herbal empiricists. The stage was now set for the development of the scientific diagnosis of patients, both dead and alive. The diagnosis of live patients is a surprisingly recent development. The first diagnostic method, thoracic percussion, was discovered in 1756 by Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the son of an innkeeper in Graz, Austria. As a youngster, Auenbrugger learned to tap caskets of wine to determine the quantity of liquid in the container and applied the technique to the human chest. This simple but ingenious method led the famed French physician, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) to hit on the idea of thoracic auscultation and, in 1816, to the invention of the stethoscope. Although standard thermometric values were developed in the seventeenth century, the systematic measurement of body temperature was introduced into medicine only in 1851. The development of an ever-growing array of diagnostic instruments and techniques followed quickly. Today, the practicing physician can diagnose many diseases in the living patient as objectively and almost as effectively as the pathologist can diagnose them at autopsy. The long-standing gap between antemortem (clinical) diagnosis and postmortem (autopsy) diagnosis has narrowed but has not disappeared. Despite modern diagnostic techniques, the postmortem examination of the cadaver remains an indispensable tool for scientific medicine and forensic pathology.
... Although the development of the modern, scientific concept of disease was a gradual process, the publication, in 1858, of Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological History, by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), is generally accepted as signaling the birth of modern medicine as a profession based on empirical science. The study of pathology as the phenomenology of disease, combined with the study of bacteriology as the etiology of infectious disease, placed medicine as the study of bodily disease on the rock-solid foundation of modern science.
Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001: xxiii-6)
01 July 2009
the throne of the mind
What determines the question a scientist pursues? One side in the so-called science wars holds that the investigation of nature is a purely objective pursuit, walled off from the influence of the surrounding society and culture by built-in safeguards, such as the demand that scientific results be replicable and the requirement that scientific theories accord with nature. The gravitational force of a Marxist, in other words, is identical to the gravitational force of a fascist. Or, more starkly, if you're looking for proof that science is not a social construct, as so-called science critics contend, just step out the window and see whether the theory of gravity is a mere figment of a scientist's imagination.
That the findings of science are firmly grounded in empiricism is clear. But the questions of science are another matter. For the questions one might ask of nature are, for all intents and purposes, without end. Although the methods of science today may be largely objective, the choice of what question to ask is not. This is not a shortcoming, much less a fault, of science. It is, rather, a reflection of the necessary fact that science is, at bottom, a human endeavor. Running through both psychiatry and neuroscience is a theme that seemed deeply disturbing to me almost from the moment I began reading in the field ... when my conviction that the inner working of the mind was the only mystery worth pursuing made me vow to become a psychiatrist. What disturbed me was the idea that free will died with Freud—or even earlier, with the materialism of the triumphant scientific revolution. Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that the will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of the brain does not exist.
Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain (2003: 7-8)
That the findings of science are firmly grounded in empiricism is clear. But the questions of science are another matter. For the questions one might ask of nature are, for all intents and purposes, without end. Although the methods of science today may be largely objective, the choice of what question to ask is not. This is not a shortcoming, much less a fault, of science. It is, rather, a reflection of the necessary fact that science is, at bottom, a human endeavor. Running through both psychiatry and neuroscience is a theme that seemed deeply disturbing to me almost from the moment I began reading in the field ... when my conviction that the inner working of the mind was the only mystery worth pursuing made me vow to become a psychiatrist. What disturbed me was the idea that free will died with Freud—or even earlier, with the materialism of the triumphant scientific revolution. Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that the will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of the brain does not exist.
Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain (2003: 7-8)
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